Exterior Cleaning in Armadale
Tall boom-era frontages on blocks too tight to stand back from, and a suburb that is two thirds flats and terraces. Insured crew, photos on every job.
- $20M public liability insurance
- Police-checked, WorkSafe compliant
- 5.0 from 170 Google reviews
- Not happy with the work? You don't pay
Armadale takes its name from a house, and the house takes its name from a village in Sutherland where James Munro was born. Munro became the fifteenth Premier of Victoria and one of the land boomers the 1890s crash took down with it. His Armadale House went up on Kooyong Road in 1876, a two-storey Italianate mansion, and it is still there and heritage-listed.
The railway reached Armadale in 1879 and the subdivisions followed it. Trams came later and came from three directions: High Street in 1910, Malvern Road in 1915, Dandenong and Wattletree Roads in 1928. Between them they fixed the shape of a suburb that is only two and a bit square kilometres across.
Several large residences with generous grounds went up in that boom. Almost all of them survive. Almost none of the grounds do. The land around them was sold and built on, which is why a little over nine thousand people now live in Armadale on 2.2 square kilometres, and why only about a third of the dwellings are detached houses. Forty-one per cent are flats and another quarter are terraces or row houses.
For exterior work that history has one very practical consequence, and it has nothing to do with how old the buildings are.
The houses survived. The gardens did not.
A boom-era frontage is two or three storeys of rendered masonry with heavy mouldings, string courses and a parapet across the top. It was designed to be looked at from the far side of a garden, because when it was built there was one.
There usually is not one now. The ground that gave an Armadale house its setting was subdivided and built on, so the same wall often stands two or three metres from whatever went up beside it. The building did not change. Everything you would want to stand on to reach it did.
That is the whole job here. You cannot get back far enough to work a pole square to the wall, and on a strip of ground that narrow there is frequently nowhere level to foot a ladder either. So the work goes vertical rather than backwards: reached from the building above instead of the ground below, which is high-rise window cleaning equipment used on a three-storey house rather than a tower.
And the surface is the fragile kind. Render and brickwork of the 1870s through 1890s sit in lime mortar, and the mouldings and string courses that make these frontages worth looking at are also horizontal ledges that hold dirt and water. They are where the wall shows its age first, and they are the last place anything should be driven at under pressure. Low pressure and a solution, every time: facade cleaning on the grand ones and house washing on everything else.
The one surface on High Street that does get cleaned
High Street is the spine of the suburb, running east from the station, and the trade along it is antiques, decorative furnishings, art, bridal and fashion. Which means the window display is not decoration. It is the business.
So the glass on this strip gets cleaned, and gets cleaned often. That makes Armadale the opposite of most shopping strips we work on, where the glass is the thing nobody has touched.
What does not get cleaned here is everything immediately around it. The awning above the window, the tiled stallboard underneath it, the verandah posts, the frames, the signage band. Those go years, and the contrast works against the shop: a spotless pane in a grubby surround reads worse than both of them being merely average, because the clean glass is what draws the eye to the rest.
The sensible split for a trader is to put the glass on a short cycle and the surround on a long one, rather than paying for everything at the same interval or ignoring half of it. That is commercial window cleaning on one schedule and facade cleaning on another, quoted separately so the two can actually run at different rates.
Services we run in Armadale
The work we take on around Armadale. Each card opens the full service page.
Gutter cleaning
Vacuumed, downpipes flushed and flow-tested, photo report the same day.
See detailsSolar panel cleaning
Panels washed with demineralised water, frames included, output stops dropping off.
See detailsRoof cleaning
Terracotta and Colorbond, moss and lichen treated to slow regrowth.
See detailsWindow cleaning
Glass, frames and tracks, inside and out, streak-free on the dry check.
See detailsPressure cleaning
Driveways, paving and concrete brought back without scarring the surface.
See detailsSoft washing
Render, cladding and painted surfaces washed at low pressure.
See detailsJobs we've finished in Armadale
Window cleaningA two-storey apartment building on Orrong Road, Armadale, with timber-framed windows cleaned from the outside. Two technicians, four hours.
Read case study
Gutter cleaningGutter cleaning on a house on Auburn Grove, Armadale, a street that runs down to High Street. The gutters had not been touched in years and there was grass growing along the length of them, on a sheet metal roof.
Read case studyWhat owners here ask before booking
There is barely two metres between our wall and the neighbour's. Can you still work?+
Usually yes, but not with a ladder and not with a pole, because neither has room to do its job in a gap that size. The wall gets reached from above instead, off the building. The thing we establish before quoting is whose land that strip actually is, because on blocks subdivided out of old gardens the boundary is rarely where people assume it is.
How do you reach a second or third storey on an Armadale block with nowhere to foot a ladder?+
On rope, from anchors set above, which is the same method used on commercial towers and works just as well on a three-storey house. It is slower to set up than a ladder and faster than scaffold, and nothing has to lean on a frontage that was never built to carry a load.
The front has mouldings and string courses all over it. Does that change the wash?+
It changes where the attention goes. Every horizontal ledge on a facade collects dirt and holds water after rain, so those are the lines that discolour first and the lines that get the most care. They are also the most fragile part of a rendered front, so nothing is driven at them. Solution, dwell time, low-pressure rinse.
Our flat is in an old house that was divided up. Who organises the work?+
Whoever runs the owners corporation, and in a small converted building that is often one of the residents rather than a manager. It works better if one person collects the scope for the whole building and we quote that, instead of three owners quoting three parts of one wall. The photographs go to everybody either way.
We trade on High Street. Can the glass be done often and the rest rarely?+
Yes, and it is what we would suggest. The glass earns its keep weekly or fortnightly on a retail strip. The awning, the stallboard and the frames do not need that and should not be paid for at that rate. Two quotes on two intervals is cheaper over a year than one compromise interval.
Rated by Melbourne
Armadale jobs are posted to our Google profile with before-and-after photos as they finish.